


Pet

by Davechicken



Series: The Emperor and his Knight [15]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-08 00:32:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6831676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Davechicken/pseuds/Davechicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe loves his pet. He loves to watch him train, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pet

Poe finishes a little early, for a change. He does tend – now he has to do such things – to over-estimate time to ensure he is never late. It does not look good when things consistently finish after a delay, so he functions on the premise of ‘under promise, over deliver’. Of course, this ruthless efficiency then lulls him into a false sense of security and he takes on increasingly more ‘little’ things at the end of days, and that’s what usually makes him late.

Today, however, he’d been smart. Smart _er_. He’d closed his portfolio, his dashboard reports, his data feeds and trending information. Closed it all down and gone in search of Kylo.

He could find him with a few words to the system’s mainframe, of course. The Knight’s whereabouts were privileged information, accessible only to himself without application and approval from his hand. It wasn’t the point, though.

Kylo mostly works on training his Knights of Ren, something Poe isn’t wholly sure about, but which does give Kylo a sense of purpose. Poe distrusts them from a logical, cynical sense: there’s no saying one of them won’t take ideas from Kylo’s assassination of the Supreme Leader, and try to kill them both. (It would have to be _them both_ , as where one went, the other did. If you were foolish enough to leave one alive, you’d not live long in your regret.) Still, Force-sensitives are powerful allies, and Kylo is sure he could tell before it became a problem, so Poe trusts his judgement. After all, his beloved Knight, pet, and husband has skills he does not. It’s just the way of things, and he has to acknowledge his own skillset gap. It’s not something he can train into, it’s an permanent blindness, a lack of a limb that his lover has over the top of what’s ‘normal’.

Right now, Kylo is in the dojo. Poe goes to the observation room, the one Kylo watches his students train from, when he’s not getting involved. He takes a seat, and enjoys the show.

The Knight is dressed in his full uniform, mask included. He doesn’t always wear it, now. There’s no need, because the _name_ of Kylo Ren is enough, and there’s nothing left for him to hide, or hide **from**. It’s purely a battle mask, worn in times of combat or training. Poe can see the advantages, there. It protects his face and skull to a degree, and is still terrifying. It also is what Kylo learned to fight in, and taking it off can disorient him in a fight. 

The mask never really felt like ‘Kylo’, to Poe, though. Even when they were two secret lovers, trysting in the dark cupboards, huddling together in his room. Poe had insisted he take it off the minute he could, and had loved to see his old friend’s face, there. It had been a private face for all those years, one only his eyes and fingers could trace, but now he’s glad the galaxy can see it - because it’s publicly _his_. His Knight. His Right Hand. His Enforcer. His Consort. His Husband. They know those titles, those lines, and those are all they need to know.

They are all Kylo, though the other title is him, too. _Pet_. Beloved pet. It’s never been said or meant disparagingly, that just isn’t who they are. It had sort of happened by accident, though Poe is happy it did. He’d never been comfortable with the idea of a ‘slave’, that term feeling too like Kylo had no choice, even if he did. Poe controls what they do to the greater degree, but he also would stop if Kylo ever – **ever** – needed him to. Slave is too like what Anakin had lived through, it was a real thing, a real oppression. ‘Boy’ wasn’t right, either. There was only two years between them, and he was sure at times that Kylo was more mature than he could be. The things he’d had to do for their survival had aged him emotionally beyond the years on his bones. Stretched him taller, honed him sharper. 

Pet had slipped out as a term of endearment, more than anything. Kylo had reacted with pleasure, rolling in the softness of it, the caring. It wasn’t that he was an _animal_ , no. He was a rational being, but one cared for and looked after. One who chose to stay with and respect his Master. It had worked, and they didn’t feel the need to keep looking for something else, when both of them felt fine saying it. 

His pet works hard, pushing the two who attack him through their paces. His saber is out, flashing hotcold death through the air. These training sessions are not safe and bloodless, and he’s known Kylo come home with scratches, or worse. (But the other party left with a lot more intensive injury, if so.) Poe admires the brute physicality of it, combined with the lithe, knowing grace. Kylo and his Knights can anticipate movements preternaturally, so watching them is like watching a previously choreographed dance with death as the penalty for failing to comply. He can’t see his face or hands, but he knows there’ll be a faint streak of sweat under where the band presses to his forehead, and that his lips will full and his face pink. His hands tremble almost imperceptibly with the last blow he catches in the cross-guard, and Poe feels a stab of affection and lust at that. Weird. But good. Kylo catches the blow, and throws it back, following it up with an invisible wall that bears the second one away as he stalks to the first. A flurry, a death-threat carved into the fabric of spacetime itself, and the younger Knight yields at once.

The second student yields a moment later, de-igniting their blade. Sometimes Kylo lets them draw, but he never lets them really win. Depending on their mood and behaviour will influence if he feels they need pushing back into line, or lifting up. They likely don’t know it’s all orchestrated, not really. He has that way of making them believe the draws are real, which is a skill in and of itself. 

The battle ends, and both Knights dip their heads in respect, withdrawing to lick their wounds in private. They don’t seem overly upset in their retreat, and Poe wonders what Kylo said to them. He waits until Kylo flicks his own blade off before he enters the room. As he does, his Knight is already removing his helm. Their eyes lock as the mask is lifted, placed to one side. As predicted, light signs of exertion make him a patchwork of white-red, and Poe reaches to push an errant lock of dark hair behind his ear.

“Have I kept you waiting long?” Kylo asks.

“Not long at all. I was just admiring watching you work.” The irony is not lost on him, as it is normally the reverse. 

“They are getting better. I would like to find them Apprentices of their own, sometime soon. It would help them to have a view of the Force from a teacher’s perspective. It deepens your own understanding.”

“We will step up our recruitment processes,” Poe agrees. “The first few are still going through the final stages of assessment. Once I know they’ll be loyal enough, you can start your induction.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you done for the day?”

Kylo nods. “I am, unless you have something you’d like me to do?”

“Just come back with me. I would love to have an unhurried dinner, for once. And I think you said we had a holo we _had_ to watch?”

His Knight beams, glorious in such a simple act of intimacy. It’s not as easy, now, to get free time. Or maybe it is, but because it’s only obligations of his own choosing rather than externally imposed that it seems harder. Poe would spend all day every day with him, if he could. He really would.

“Yes, there’s a movie we should see. It sounds like our kind of thing. I’ve been avoiding spoilers by threatening to execute people.”

“Please don’t execute them unless you really need to,” Poe chides.

“The threat is adequate to still their tongues,” Kylo reassures him. “So… date night?”

“Date night,” Poe says, and holds his hands out to his Knight. 

They step in close, and a light tug on his hands has Kylo dipping his head and knees obediently, pressing against Poe’s forehead, breathing in the other.  

“I can’t wait,” Kylo tells him.

Poe feels his stomach skip like he’s eighteen all over again. Kylo has that effect on him, he always has. All these years, and the slightest smile still makes him giddy and lost in love. He never expected – back when he was little – that he’d be here. He’d always had smaller dreams: piloting. No… not smaller. Different. He’d expected great things of himself (and of Ben), but in a different milieu. He’d thought they’d be heroes, one way or another.

Of course, hero was just the term for the winner. You were only the villain if you lost, or from the perspective of the loser. The First Order had given Ben – _Kylo_ – the freedom to be who he needed to be, or had given him more than the Jedi were prepared to. And then, when he’d run to the end of that leash, the only way to keep making things safe for him had been for Poe to take control of the leash and destroy anyone else who tried to keep his beloved in chains.

Maybe it’s the wrong reason to rise, maybe. But the galaxy hadn’t been ready to let his Kylo be in peace, and Kylo was the bright star at the centre of his system, the gravity-well; the bright, hot core of the galaxy, around which everything else rotated. There’d been things he’d disliked along the way, but there’d been things he’d disliked with how the others had treated them, too.

And if you can’t trust people to do the job right, well. You either put up and shut up, or you take over. Poe knew which he preferred to do.


End file.
